I figure it must smell in the immediate area but is it traveling north to Tribeca or Soho?
Depends on where you are. This past weekend I was down by Canal Street, and it’s very hard to breathe. Up in Chelsea, it was a little better. Don’t know about Soho, though. Sorry. Guess I wasn’t much help!
When the wind is right, it smells bad on the Upper West Side. Not bodies-are-rotting-next-door bad, but burnt building/concrete dust/maybe a hint of rot bad.
I was just on Beekman Street, a mere three blocks from the former WTC. Air is totally clear and normal. If you hadn’t known the WTC used to exist, you’d never guess that a major disaster had just occurred.
I read an article at Salon that said that they expect to come up short on the body count, and that the workers there are breathing vaporized people. So, smelly or not, that’s pretty freaking gruesome.
My sister lives in Jersey City(poor baby) and has the worst respiratory system that ever a human had. She has been in dire straights many days this last week. Depends on the winds.
I was a block over from ground zero on Sunday night and there was a burnt smell, but not much beyond that. We took a walk around the stock exchange and except for the cops and national guard, you’d be hard pressed to know anything had happened. Very eerie.
Late this afternoon, there was a strong smell of spoiled fish in the Fulton Street subway station on the 4 & 5 line.
Even up in Queens, usu. in the evenings, we get the smell of sulfur, etc. Burned, flinty smells–not decaying smells.
One of my wife’s co-workers, a former airline mechanic who is handy with a cutting torch, volunteered down at ground zero this weekend (cutting steel for the rescue workers). He came back to work this week, totally shaken and quiet (he’s an ebullient early-20s raver). He said the smell down there is unbelievable, and that, though he had heard the expression before, he now knows what death smells like.
Will there be much of a smell? I’ve been wondering if the bodies buried deep in the rubble will decay much or if they’ll be protected by the rubble. For how long will the facial features and fingerprints remain recognizable for identification purposes?
In lower Brooklyn (Park Slope), when the wind blows in from lower Manhattan it still smells like burning rubber. When some Dopers met in Prospect Park last Sunday (9/15) the smell was strong and very distracting.
Since we Americans have an unusual concern with recovering and properly interring our dead, we’re pretty experienced with this sort of thing. DNA samples are already being taken from personal effects of the missing and their close relatives in order to identify their remains upon recovery.
this is too disturbing to consider but it hit me the second I saw the colapse.
Aren’t there about 5000 bodies buried there? I would think you could smell that for miles. Since nobody is still probably left alive, then why can’t they cleanit up by scooping it into dump trucks and hauling it off. The last time I saw they were still grabbing it one piece at a time.
I mean nobody is still alive trapped in the upper rubble. the only possible survivors are in the lower levels where the entire room could be intact. but these people would be running out of time and you would think they need to be treated as “buried alive” and all haste made to dig them out. but they seem to be taking their time.
Of course that is just my impression from watching the news. If I am wrong then let me forgive me.
My impression from those who have been down to the scene (hearsay, I know) is that we aren’t being shown even a fraction of what is going on down there.
That said, I’m sure they can’t be too indiscriminate with their hauling and scooping and dumping–engineers are having serious worries about what collapses of the piles of debris may have on surrounding buildings. So they have to go at a measured pace, bodies or no.
A report from one relief worker is that there isn’t much of the “smell of death” but rather the stink donated food gone bad. We’re talking once-fresh meat & veggies here.
Gotta remember to pay attention when I go back and change things. That’s the second time today I lost a word, “of” in this case.
I don’t think they’ve recovered the black boxes yet, so they still need to carefully examine the debris. I seem to recall that one of the hijacker’s passports was discovered on one of the streets below, blown far enough away from the inferno that it survived intact. So there may still be things to find in there.